The present invention relates generally to orthopedic surgical instruments. In particular, the present invention relates to a customized unicompartmental tibial cutting guide.
Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) has significantly increased its market share in the treatment of unicompartmental osteoarthritis in the United States over the last decade. Long-term survival of UKA in registries has, however, been reported to be inferior to that of total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Experience with UKA contributes tremendously to successful outcome of this procedure. As indications for UKA are less common, this experience is relatively hard to achieve in the average orthopedic practice.
Many of the early revisions of UKA seem to be due to implant-related problems, such as malpositioning, and this may at least in some cases relate to the experience level of the operating surgeon. Thus, an easy and affordable approach for reproducible implantation of UKA components would be highly desirable. This is accomplished by the patient-specific instrumentation (PSI) of the present invention applying customized unicompartamental tibial cutting guides for orthopedic surgery.